The week after we found out the documentary requirements Lauren took me out in her car again, and we bombed around on all of the side roads outside of town. In some ways Lauren seems like she is so much older and wiser than me, even though we are the same age, but she drives like someone unhinged. She goes fast and sometimes goes over the shoulder — and my heart starts racing and sometimes she laughs, surprised, before getting back on the road — but we have hit nothing yet. Though her little blue Pontiac is already pretty dinged up. We missed a merge sign on the highway and when the lane began to cut down to nothing she gunned her car until it growled hoarse and throaty to catch and pass the car that was threatening to nose us off the road. We could have waited, I guess, but that’s not Lauren’s style.
“Holy shit!” she said. “I didn’t think we’d make it.”
Not a reassuring thing for a passenger to hear. But she spoke with all of the weight gone out of her, surprised and light, in a way that made it okay somehow.
I wanted to impress her badly, so I grabbed her bare arm. With anyone else, I would never. With her, it’s an extension of the game.
“My hands are sweaty!” I said. “Feel that. You almost killed us.”
“Ah!” The car lurched. She gave me a scolding look, but I could tell she was delighted. “Jesus — you made me jump.”
At Wok-In she went up to the counter to pay and for a minute I was able to fantasize that when she turned around again, with our noodles, our bean curd, our beef and vegetables, our soy sauce packets, and our individually wrapped fortune cookies, I would put an arm around her and we would leave together. I mean, we left together, anyway, but I mean together, entwined. When she got the food and raised it to me triumphantly, I said something ironic back to her, I don’t remember what now, but nothing of what was actually on my mind. She has a boyfriend and I don’t like him and I don’t need to I guess, yet she is with me, driving me around, and I don’t know whether that means anything, or if it should.
I’ve never been such good friends with a girl before, and I don’t always know what that means or what to do.
She drove us to a distant park she knew of, in Orangeville, maybe one that she used to go to as a kid. Cracked asphalt parking lot with weeds poking through. We lapped up noodles in the darkness but were otherwise mostly silent. I was thinking of what everything meant and I guess she had something on her mind, too.
On the way back to Durham I watched as the hills and fields rose and fell beside us, feeling the power of the earth as the car moved across it, and how small we were on the road between everything, wondering how big mountains must be and thinking about the space between the hills and the air underneath birds and the low grey of clouds, rolling and cracking, passing over and surrendering the moon high above.
I enjoyed the silence and when she pulled her car in front of my house I got the feeling that we both had. Still, there were questions running through my head as we sat in the shade of the maple glistening in the soft, blue light. Are we just friends or are we more than that? Should I make a move? Is anybody watching? Why has it become so still, so quiet? What’s she thinking? Her body was turned away from mine and she was fiddling with the little knob that controlled the car’s side mirrors.
I put my hand on her armrest and hesitated. She didn’t notice. Or if she did notice she didn’t make a sign. Tension in the air elevated. But it was almost imperceptible.
It might have only been in me.
“I gotta go,” I said, removing my hand.
She looked back at me and turned the car back on.
Relieved, I popped the door open.
“See you in bio,” I said.
“Yeah. See ya.”
She pulled away and she was smiling, I think, but it was hard to tell, because when I looked back at her again she seemed as hard as asphalt, concentrating on the road.
* * *
For a long time Lauren was one of those people I always heard about but never met, for whatever reason, like she ran in a circle whose circumference almost touched mine at every point, but never, somehow, overlapped. Maybe that’s easy to explain — maybe it just means one circle was bigger than the other. Maybe hers was a little bit bigger than mine. I had the basic information: Dark, curly hair, short. Sort of preppy, but not really. Maybe more of a skater? But a subtle kind if she was one. A smallish head — not in a weird way, everyone quickly explained. Just kind of smallish, like an elf, but a pretty one. Walid told me she was hot, but in a grudging way that confused my idea of her. Like she would be angry or have a third hand. (They don’t get along.) I didn’t know what to expect, not that I felt like I should expect anything. Not that I was waiting to meet her. I was probably more afraid than anything, which is pretty consistent with my general fear and apprehension of meeting new people.
But when you hear about a person as much as I heard about Lauren, you eventually meet them. And then it seems like the most obvious thing in the world. I met Lauren in biology class, the first period of the new school year. She was sitting about a foot away from me, and Mr. Salazar made a really stupid joke about the transfer of energy in an ecosystem. I don’t remember it at all. I just muttered, “Cemeteries,” under my breath and Lauren laughed sharply but quietly and said, “What?” and I was surprised because it had been a joke just for me and I didn’t think anyone would hear me, let alone laugh. I just said “Cemeteries” again, but seriously this time, and she nodded very sagely and crossed out her last note and just wrote down cemeteries, on the handout in front of her, and I nodded like she’d done the most obvious thing in the world.
So, the first time we ever hung out after school was at a cemetery, of course, the old one on Main with the huge stone gates and all of the graves from important people who had lived in the town in the last hundred and fifty years. The place closed at five normally, but we parked on a side road and hiked around back. Lauren said the caretaker was only there from ten until three and I asked her how she could know something like that. “Are you goth?” I said. “Are you a secret goth? Do you come here all the time?” and she said no, she wasn’t goth, her grandfather had just been the caretaker after he retired.
I asked her if that meant she knew all of the cemetery’s secrets.
“What secrets?” she said.
“Like, where the famous people are buried,” I said. “And who rises up from their graves on the full moon?”
She told me that I was an idiot and that her grandfather had been a not extremely nice man who never would have told her anything even if he did know. And that he was dead, anyway.
“But knowing Durham, if there are secrets,” she said, “they would be ridiculous secrets. The kinds of secrets you would be embarrassed to know.”
That was a funny thing to say and I thought about it for a minute.
“I don’t know what that would be,” I said.
“I don’t either, really,” she said.
Then she got distant and for some reason I felt sort of embarrassed and I wondered whether meeting me at the cemetery was an embarrassing secret for her. Because, and I know this is stupid, I was a different sort of person than the kind of guys she usually hung out with. I didn’t think that’s what she had meant, but the longer she was quiet the more I wondered that. It was in the silence, too, that I remembered that Jeff was buried across town, and that I shouldn’t joke so much about cemeteries and death, because, I don’t know, it made me a dumb and callous fucked up idiot, I guess. It was just that sometimes I didn’t make the connection. Because I still didn’t always want to connect the general to the personal and I thought that if I didn’t do that maybe Jeff would still be around, somehow.
“Hey,” I finally said. “I have one.”
“Have what?”
“A ridiculous secret.”
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s hear it.”
“Knowing who the Saddest Man is.”
She laughed. “What?”
“Knowing who the saddest person is who regularly visits the cemetery.”
“Hmm,” she said.
For some reason I started wondering if she had been thinking about Jeff, too. Did she even know about him? I was sure I’d never mentioned him to her before. There had been an announcement in school and there had been a page in the yearbook, but it seemed like the kind of thing that would be easy to overlook if you didn’t know him, especially because he was a few years older than us. I definitely didn’t talk about him in class.
Obviously, I guess.
What I wondered was this: Did she think I was secretly sad? Had I just admitted that?
“Does it have to be a man?” she asked.
“I guess not,” I said. “I just like imagining a guy in a top hat. He’s not even visiting anyone. He just walks around. Very formal. And very sad.”
She thought about that for a moment.
“Okay. That’s pretty funny. But is that really a secret?”
“No,” I said. “I guess not.”
Soon we walked back to the car and drove around for a little while with the windows down and her stereo turned up. Until we got tired of that and she drove me home. Mom was asleep so when I got inside I quietly walked up to my room and got under the sheets.
I closed my eyes and tried relaxing, but I couldn’t fall asleep. Instead, I debated whether I was an idiot or a moron. I wasn’t quite clear about the lexical differences between the two but I eventually decided “moron.” It seemed important to distinguish between them even though I knew I was definitely one of the two. “Idiot” seemed more incidental and “moron” seemed more internal, inherent. I thought I’d been boring and fucked everything up. That she would never want to talk to me again, not even as a friend. But the next day in bio, nothing had changed.
Definitely a moron, I thought to myself.
* * *
Mom had been coming home later than usual. They were short-handed at the real estate office because a few of the brokers had retired and their other full-time administrator had suddenly quit. Mom had taken a course in real estate sales and she was hoping to become a broker herself, so they had her filling in for a few clients while doing everything she normally did and covering for the new hire while they were being trained. I’d started fixing dinner on the nights she knew she was going to be late. Really simple stuff: rice and ground beef, frozen lasagnas, spaghetti with canned sauce and frozen meatballs. Some days she came in so late that I’d already be in bed, and I’d come down the stairs in the morning only to find her asleep on the couch with the television on at a low volume. One morning I found her standing at the sink in her work clothes from the night before, staring out the window that looked out onto our neighbours’ brick wall.
“Good morning,” I said, cautiously walking around her and grabbing a box of cereal. She just looked at me and winced.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
I poured myself a healthy-size bowl and grabbed a spoon.
“Did you sleep on the couch again?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, without turning around.
“Yes,” she said again.
I was worried about her. I wondered if she should step away from some of her responsibilities, at least until the other administrator was up to speed. Maybe even wait until the summer to take on her new duties, since the office typically hired on a student assistant. But she told me that she had been waiting a long time for the opportunity that she had now and that she wasn’t going to jeopardize it by stepping down.
“What about your health?” I asked.
“What do I care about my health?” she said.
“I’m serious.”
She didn’t say anything for a while.
“You know, last night I dreamed that you were a jungle,” she said, finally. “Like, a person, but also somehow a jungle. And you kept sending me packages that I didn’t want to open. The living room was filled with them.”
I was offended. If I was sending her packages I assumed they were important.
“Why wouldn’t you open them?”
She looked at me.
“Because I was worried that you and your dumb-ass friend Walid were playing some kind of a trick on me. All of the packages were addressed ‘From Jeff,’” she said.
“Oh,” I said, quietly. “I wouldn’t do that.”
“I know,” she said. “And then I started worrying that they actually were from Jeff and that they were time-sensitive or something — like he was in trouble and he was sending me clues. But they went missing and I had the idea that you stole them.”
“Jesus,” I said. I wished she hadn’t told me that.
It was like a light went on in her.
“Oh my god, I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you wouldn’t. I’m just — I don’t know.” Then she was silent for a long while. After I finished my cereal I got up to put the bowl in the sink and I saw that her eyes were closed. I was worried she was crying, but I couldn’t find any evidence that she was. I watched her for a long time before I put my bowl and spoon in the sink. For a minute I wondered if she’d actually fallen asleep standing up.
She opened her eyes as my dishes clattered.
“I better get ready for work,” she said, heading upstairs. Then, calling from the hallway: “Believe it or not, I made you a lunch. It’s in the fridge.” Lunch was three slices of cheese between two slices of bread. A banana sat on top of the Ziploc bag.
I guess I couldn’t complain.